To keep pace with the fast moving corporate environment a
company needs to stay on the leading edge of advances in technology.
Every year companies spend large amounts of time finding ways to make
their business operations more efficient and improve resource
management. The companies that are quickest to adapt to new technology
inevitably gain prominence until their competitors can copy them. Using
virtualization platforms is rapidly becoming the standard in business
management systems because of the proven advantages it has shown.
Virtualization systems work in direct contrast to multiple server
environments. In a multiple server environment a company spreads
applications and operating systems across several different machines to
store and protect their files and information. This becomes expensive
because each server requires a great deal of attention and care to
continue to operate efficiently. IT administrators spend their time
backing up information, archiving files, updating the servers and
providing general maintenance for the machines. It is a repetitive
process that does not allow the IT admins to make the best use of their
time. The larger the networks grow the more time inclusive they become
and the inherent costs grow.
A virtualization platform allows a company to put all of the information
that they have in one condensed space on a single server. The new
platform increases IT network efficiency and minimizes operating costs
by only requiring a single machine to store the information. To access
the information companies can use different virtual machines that share
the resources of the single server. Consolidating the information allows
IT admins to spend less of their time focusing on upkeep and causes
less free space to be wasted on the servers.
Virtualization systems are not without flaws; there are three main
obstacles that often arise. I/O bandwidth bottlenecks sooner because of
accelerated fragmentation on virtual platforms, virtual machine
competition for shared I/O resources is not effectively prioritized
across the platform, and virtual disks set to dynamically grow do not
resize when data are deleted creating wasted free space. These issues
can all arise and create problems on a virtualization infrastructure.
These problems are common but they are easily prevented with the right
care. A company only needs to install a
virtualization platform disk
optimizer. This software will work on the virtualization platform to
make sure that it is capable of maximum efficiency and performance.
V-locity from
Diskeeper Corporation is specifically designed with
exclusive features that make it the most effective way to optimize a
virtualization platform.
V-locity provides unique components that make it the best choice to
optimize a virtual platform. The IntelliWrite ® Technology writes much
larger sequential disk I/Os from Windows virtual machines for better
overall performance. In addition it creates less work for the
copy-on-write technology that copies/tracks every write. The
InvisiTasking ® technology component operates invisibly to optimize all
of the windows operating systems. The technology works in the background
to ensure that V-locity won’t cut across the production needs of other
virtual machines.
Systems that use special virtual disk types can take advantage of the
Virtual Disk Intelligence to recognize the special virtual disk and work
specifically with that kind of hardware. The special disks operate
faster, more efficiently and allow the user to get peak performance.
V-locity also provides for systems with Thin/Dynamic disks. These disks
often waste free space because they are set to resize but are only ever
capable of growing. They never shrink on their own and the data that are
deleted from these disks create free space are no longer used by the
computer. The free space creates a space “hole” that will never be
filled or removed on its own. Virtual Disk Compaction provides a way to
deal with the space “holes” and allow the free space to be reused. A
graphical user interface will display how much space can be gained from
compaction and provide a one-click way to begin the process.
Staying at the forefront of technology requires a company to switch to a
virtualization infrastructure. The companies that truly take advantage
of this change will recognize that they need to protect the new virtual
platform from the most common problems to gain the most efficiency.
V-locity will ensure that a virtual server is getting the maximum I/O
performance possible and that the entire system is operating at its peak
capability.
